1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to dentistry, and more particularly to fabricating dental articles using a combination of digitally-controlled reductive processes and digitally-controlled additive processes.
2. Description of the Related Art
One technique for fabricating crowns and other dental articles employs a computer-controlled milling machine to shape a mill blank into a desired end product. Most commercially available mill blanks are made of ceramic or some other material suitably hard for use in a final dental restoration, such as porcelain or micaceous ceramics. However, milled dental articles have generally monolithic visual appearance due to the corresponding, monolithic composition of dental mill blanks. It may still require a number of manual finishing steps in order to achieve an appearance consistent with surrounding dentition.
There remains a need for improved automation in the fabrication of highly aesthetic, multi-chromatic dental articles from digital, three-dimensional dental data.